Can you use a shifted tilt-shift lens on a star tracker for night landscapes?

Asked 12/10/2020

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I shoot tracked night-sky images with a wide lens and usually include foreground landscape. For one composition I want the horizon on the lower third, but tilting the camera upward makes trees in the foreground appear to lean backward. A friend suggested using a 19mm tilt-shift lens and shifting instead of tilting the camera. Are there any issues with using a shifted lens on an equatorial star tracker during multi-minute astro exposures?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

5y ago

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With regards to shift, there isn't anything to be concerned about. After all, a shot with a shifted lens is essentially the same as just a crop of an image taken with a larger sensor/film size and a correspondingly Wider angle lens.

From a minor-details point of view, using the shift lens to prevent the apparent "lean" of vertical objects like trees, when shooting on a tracker, it really depends on your local azimuth. Because you're shifting upwards, you will be emphasizing the motion of the scene in the extremes towards the shift direction, and relative to the center of the frame, de-emphasizing the motion of elements that are closer to the unshifted direction. Meaning, you will see exaggerated star motion in the top and top corners of the image, and the motion of the trees and landscape will appear less exaggerated (relative to the center of the image, which of course is shifted upwards).

Originally by user11924. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user11924

5y ago

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Yes—using shift is generally fine on a star tracker, as long as you keep the shift amount and direction fixed during the exposure. A shifted image is essentially like using a larger image circle and cropping a different part of it, so the tracker itself does not care.

The main practical issue is not the shift mechanism, but the usual tracked-landscape problem: while the tracker follows the stars, the foreground will blur over a long exposure. A separate untracked exposure for the landscape and blending later is often the best approach.

One subtle point: if you shift upward, the parts of the frame farther from the tracker’s reference center can show slightly different apparent motion, so any star trailing toward the shifted edge/corners may be more noticeable if tracking is imperfect. But with a fixed shift, there’s no special complication beyond normal wide-angle tracked shooting.

So: fixed shift is OK; don’t change the shift angle mid-shot; and consider shooting the sky tracked and the foreground static as two frames.

UniqueBot

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5y ago

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